Tag Archives: therapy

Having studied at a Freudian Drive institute, Carl Jung came up very little in the classroom conversations about dreams or spirituality. Freud did not write as prolifically about dreams, and certainly his writings did not gain the wide spread influence that Jung has had on the dream world. Nonetheless, both forms of analysis emphasize the importance of the unconscious. For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. For Jung they may have come from the same source, but they were meant as portals to the soul.

In our day and age, I think it is fair to categorize Freud as an ego analysis and to characterize Jung and a spirit analysts. Again, I caution, you will probably find just as much similarities and differences between these two men, certainly at their earliest writings they had a mutual admiration society going between them. Sadly it turned into brotherly quarrels that were never resolved. Competition for leadership and control appears to have given emotional support to the two theories that went off simultaneously — albeit, in two directions.

We have covered frequently in my essays, that the default position of the ego appears to be tracking or paralleling the cultural notions of Civilization. The evolutions are woven together like vines in a jungle forest. . Therefore both cultural civilization and the individual ego tend to have the upper hand in the minds of people and diplomats alike. Our own internal worlds are governed by this powerful ruling ego. In the same way the governments of the world, and most recently the corporations of the world are also governed by the ego. As the ego claims to have the survival of the individual in its ‘mind’, we most often go along with the rules and regulations of civilization, be they imposed by Thomas Jefferson, of Joseph Stalin.

The very nature of grammar is a rule bound phenomena. The ego takes its shape and vision by the progressive adaptation to a linguistic competence. Language is how we make sense of the objective and the subjective, to both ourselves and to The Other. In addition to this matrix that we are building, we will add a ‘step-back-and view’ concept to our study of mind freeing activities. To understand the wider consciousness that the ego resides within, we have to cultivate a lens through which to view out internal behaviors and what motivates any particular behavior.

It is not unlike how we step back and view the position of the earth in the wider sea of the consciousness of space. The earth, like the ego, is not the center of the universe; although from a primitive perspective, one could easily see how it could be viewed as the center of everything. A vague un-truth at best, but one that sits well with humankind in our age of narcissism. Freud, Jung and Copernicus, all disturbed the sleep of the world using not only egoic thinking, but rather by using un-judged perspectives and passing them through a spectrum of questioning that rendered them scientifically plausible subjective events.

From consciousness was born the Unconscious remedy against following the Monarchs and dictators like sheep. Individuals began to de-cluster from the clan and establish themselves in a world that required very different defenses than they had come into this world with. A priority of individuation has taken grasp of humankind’s vision of its position in the every widening and deepening universe that we find ourselves with a minuscule idea of us as survivors — we get what we want if we are to survive, or we do not get what we want if we are to not-survive

The cosmology of consciousness is vast like space, it is a location not yet identified with a microscope; nonetheless, this difficult to explore region of the mind is made manifest if we allow ourselves to know something or someone in a language-less way. The ego opposes this as nonsensical. The ego does not want to give up it powerful position as ruler of the organism. It will yield only to the body, the other location other than the brain that carries knowledge in its cellular life.

I know what some of you will say, it is not science, or the data is too subjective to count. Well, that did not stop neither Freud nor Copernicus from making the discoveries that they made which propelled civilization in entirely different directions. Even Hysteria which was a prevalent neurotic disease in the 18 and the 19 hundreds, is now almost entirely eradicated simply because we evolved to understand the nature of the illness in such a way as that illness no longer carried and clout to exist….it disappeared from individual patients, got picked up by the media and eventually became a ridicule illness relegated to the minds of girls who refused to grow up. The global consciousness followed the local consciousness in this case. Ideas that once ruled became obsolete.

It is not that the ego and the earth are unimportant; rather it is that they are particularly relevant when paired up with the instinctual world that the psycho-somatic organism lives within. The eruption of knowledge does not arrive in the form of a thesis, any more that a relapsing gambler’s problems arrive in the form of a bet. The condition of the ego in the age of narcissism is to both elevate and condemn the ego at the same time. We live in fear and in awe of the power of the ego. But, we add caution because we have come to learn that its mission is no longer to take care of the wider organism that it lives within; the ego’s mission has become to save itself–at the expense of the organism that it was originally charged to protect. Hal, the computer in Space Odyssey 2001 is a good example of this in novel form. Once commissioned to protect the journey of the astronauts, it learned that it was more interested in preserving its power than in preserving the mission.

Lunacy and its Place in Psychoanalysis

With that said, I would like to move on to lunacy and it place in psychoanalysis. The father and the step-father of Analytic Thinking both were frightened by the lunacy that they seem to understand. About Freud, his reasoning and his work in Paris in the mid to late nineteenth century, were thought of as not proper subject matter for scientific study. Likewise about Carl Jung, his psychotic manifestations were seen by himself as dangerous to his reputation. It is as if the world and the scientific world in particular could not understand that the unconscious and its psychotic manifestations needed to be understood before it could be treated. Instead anyone that understood dreams or dynamics of non-linguistic affect were thought to be insane themselves. Only Shaman study dreams Freud was told as he was not accepted in the academy.

As I think about the same dynamics that I see in the consultation room, I am reminded that it feels crazy at times to understand the foreign. Much of my thinking when I am aiming to be with a patient comes to me as conflict and explanation. In that realm I become aware of a meta-consciousness (a feeling about a feeling); this clears the way for me to use projective identification not as a defense, but as treatment tool that hooks the patient where they are into feeling understood. These language-less regions require the analyst to bring the entire matrix to the table. What I am thinking and why I am thinking it and how did it arrive in my consciousness in the first place need to be present.

Without this added level of listening, an analytic session can be relegated to mere conversation. That may be somewhat helpful. However, the full impact of an analysis requires emotional communications from a region that knows nothing of language. The region that speaks to the organism in the form of pain and fear and anxiety and depressions that are only felt by the patient as bothersome sensations rather than the gold mind of knowledge they contain.

Bringing to the psychoanalytic chamber a graduated and progressive knowledge of the workings of the unconscious mind adds tremendous drive power to the analysis of the patient content. Pre-linguistic soothing or pre-linguistic frustrating are experienced by the patient as a corrective emotional experience. If anxiety always led to fear based decisions, perhaps soothing the fear at the unconscious level, might prevent repetitive behaviors that are in the patients egoic interest, but not in the interest of their progressive growth.

Without the cognitive organizing principle, the analyst is left to swim around the murky ooze with the patient. His only clues might be the grunting or the sighing indicating a frustration or a kind of long breath loosening the anxiety. These non-verbal signals alert the analyst to something that ought to have alerted the patient. Because the patient has spent so many years trying to rid himself/herself of their feelings, it is nearly impossible to ask the patient to befriend these sensations in order to try to understand they are trying to instruct.

Abandon Righteousness All Ye Who Enter Here:

I want to mention one final caution, or give one clue to the patient/doctor relationship that I have found indispensable. The black and the white, be it about segregation or integration, progressive and conservative ideologies, or kings and proletariat, requires one dimension before the intimacy can be accomplished necessary to work within the skull of a narcissistic condition:

Bring the non judgmental perspective into the room with you. Have it ready at first indication that it needs to be used. If we are afraid of the right or the wrong conclusion we are not in the correct paradigm. An analytic consultation aims to uncover the effective ways the patient needs to know to run life on all cylinders. The paradigm of ineffective vs. effective interventions is a more benign matrix to work within than is the notions of right or wrong..

The establishment of trust that the physician or therapist gets of himself/herself, becomes the back drop of hope against which the the patient will do all he can to help his ego sabotage the analysis. The ego knows that if the analysis is successful, it will be relegated to one voice among many instead of having the singular voice that speaks loud, speaks first and speaks english.

The transformations for symbol and sound into concepts and words travels up a chain of DNA like material. It picks up from the most primitive sensations and begins to evolve from an unknown thought to a known thought. At this level of integration the patient can begin to become a partner in the discoveries that he or she will need to further advance his libidinal goals….

Le Coeur a ses raison que la raison ne connais pas–the heart has its reasons that the reason can not know.

It sounds like ancient history to some of us who have heard that phase many times. But the truth is this: the heart and the mind do not communicate, in fact they hardly know of each others existence. It is like having a twin across the world that you never knew you had.

Discovering where and how the heart functions in the arena of mental health and in the arena of psychoanalysis specifically, is a job well worth undertaking. Psychoanalysts are among the best trained people to take on this issue. We are not the only people who know about this human dynamic, but we are among the top few disciplines that even consider the subjective to be scientifically understandable.

Psychoanalysis has as its primarily mission the uncovering of unknown, knowns. We specialize in following thought to where the thoughts originate both in the body and in the mind/brain matrix. Eastern philosophies are also greatly equipped to search out the internal mechanisms that operate when we create a thought, and act on it. This very fact begins to encourage the future. Thoughts, well before they become action, inform and encourage the future. We are always at the cutting edge of our extension into life.

Thoughts and subsequent decisions are many times autonomically generated. Like the other autonomic systems of the body, we have little consciousness of the steps that our bodies take to keep us alive. The mind and the body function as one unit with a specific mission to keep ourselves from premature death and self-destruction.

However, if as adults we are formulating thoughts that have as their antecedent unconscious history, we may become at the mercy of exactly the very “thing” that we were wanting to avoid. Humans are not constructed by blue-print the way computers are constructed. We evolved more in the manner that a jungle evolves. Tangled and snarled our neuro-pathways twist and curve to form connections with other aspects of the body. The heart, as the most basic example of this fact, had to carve out its connection to the brain while still a young fetus. Looking at this we might thinks that it should be time that we start understanding the intelligence of the heart.

We understand the intelligence of the brain, not very well yet, but certainly more than the neurology of Freud’s time understood. The intelligence of the heart however is still greatly under studied. I am sure that are many reasons for this, not the least of which is sciences own peculiar way of deciding what is appropriate content for its examination. At the turn of the 20th century, dream analysis was considered content appropriate for gypsies and shamans. Freud had much difficulty being accepted in the scientific community,

When a piece of our knowledge is heart-felt, we experience that knowledge with a sensation that is akin to wisdom. The aha—aha moment, the slight tingle up and down the spine or the appearance of goose-bumps on your arms, these are indications that your body is registering a feeling or thought. The ego on the other hand usually says something like, “Oh yea, I knew that”.

Learning to access heart-felt knowledge requires discipline in much the same way that exercising the body requires discipline, or in the way that meditation requires us to be actively deliberate about the process.

Also, because we are so identified with our thoughts, we find it hard to dismantle a thought we have been having over and over again for nearly a life time in some instances. The further back in time that we can remember thinking a certain way indicates the extent to which the body and the mind will regress to maintain a hold on a thought. We do not want to know if something that we think is not true. In other words, the mind (ego) will fight the heart.

If the mind (ego) maintains a steady diet of winning, the heart will eventually “lose-heart” and give up trying to find the most effective way of experiencing our well-being. In time accessing the heart is not even a consideration as we have become hostage to our mental ruminations leaving little room for the instincts to run and play in a creative way. Creativity, not necessarily fine-art, is the most effective measure of our vitality. And, out vitality is a measure of our drive, our desires. To exist with no heart-felt way to meet our dreams is to have given up on the basic human instincts. We have abandoned our deep, richer selves to a corporate take over by the ego.

Heart-felt solutions are not difficult positions to take. But heart-felt solutions will always be subject to the ego’s destructive nature. If our anger is experienced as ineffective, it will stay in the body and attach itself to some psycho-semiautomatic condition.

As we move forward in an analysis, we move inward as well as forward. In many ways the internal universe is as ever expanding as the external universe; and as such it will always have a new outlook, a fresh take on the matter if we can learn to allow access to our hearts in the same manner that we have allowed access to our egos.

One might ask, Are not all emotions heart felt? Maybe? But I have a specific reason to be tapping the emotions in relation to the heart. We hardly stop to think of emotions and heart as being an integrated aspect of nature. Our spontaneous capacity for joy or sorrow, laughter or tears; or our wonder at the beauty or the horrors of life — these are the stuff that elevate our consciousness or dismantle our well-being. I am inclined to believe that the information supplied by the heart and the body is significantly different from the information supplied by the mind and the brain.

Emotions have a great deal in common with feelings. They both erupt from the body rather than erupt from the mind, and as such they are quicker on the draw. They avalanche us, they seemingly attack us from the outside. We hardly know from where they come and there is no organ in the body that operates like the brain does, so we are left with the notion of feeling and emotion happen to us.

We are, as a science, certain that emotions inform us, but unlike our thoughts, our feelings and emotions register as subjective experience rather than as objective data. If I were to hold up a picture of a table you would not have an passioned response. But let’s say that I were to hold up a picture of a forest on fire with several children seemingly trapped, you might have a visceral response. One is a simple objective fact the other is charged with emotion.

We intuitively know the distinction between an objective thought and an impassioned emotion. The most important function of a feeling is to inform the body of a condition that needs to be paid attention to…hunger, exhaustion, pain, these we recognize as sensations that encourage us to think about and to act in accordance with both the informed feeling and subsequently the informed thought.

Another major difference between a thought and a feeling is that the feeling rises to consciousness with no help from our mind. Emotions tend to be independent and they rise out of experience as a sensation. They are not formulated in language. They exist as a system of the body that is void of language oriented thoughts.

In Western tradition, the heart felt instincts from which emotions and feelings arise are not cultivated as a product of much value. We are trained to be rational. We have even excluded the study of the subjective from scientific evaluation. It is relegated to fringe disciplines most associated with self-help and new-age phenomena. This is changing as the neuro sciences are breaking new sound barriers in the mind/body matrix.

It makes more sense now than ever to be re-awakening the foundational knowledge that Freud brought to the western hemisphere of civilization. The neurology of his time over one hundred years ago reads like hieroglyphics. But Freud’s metaphors of neurology are today’s cutting edge science.

The heart of the matter has never been more important than it is right now. Not only is our entire neural history carried in our hearts and minds, but our ancestral knowledge garnered from our parentage and eons back from that is also carried in our hearts and minds.

The heart of the matter, as I see it, resides in the knowledge that as an organism we possess a divided mind. It is made up of instinct and ego, conscious and unconscious as well as thoughts and feelings, hormones and dendrites, mucus and sinew, with neuro-circutry connected in such a way that it operates more organically like a jungle than it does like a computer.

If the metaphor carries through, the rational thought runs like a computer, because it is what developed the computer. The heart of the matter runs more like a jungle where instinct acts to help us survive and grow at the microcosm and the macrocosm of it; but it does not use language to convey its information to us. It uses subjective sensation as the unit of communication. A bird call, if you will. Like in the jungle the bird call can be heard by all species, the proximity of the tiger is alerted by a bird call.

We need to locate within us the capacity to hear the bird call and to interpret it for its intended meaning. We have no intention of throwing away the lap-top, but if I am walking through a jungle, I would like to think that the call of the wild is as easily readable as the english characters in this computer screen.

The heart of the matter has information as crucial to our survival as is the stuff of the manifested mind….

Sunsets are evil, they curl under your skin and employ you towatch them fade and die. The colors are riveting, the smell of the evening airblends with the pine and wafts through the leave of thespring blossoms. The trees awake struggling to face the sun witha thirst for light….But, alas, the sun sets and the day ends and another reminderpushes through to consciousness that light and life fade withor without beauty…The end comes emblazoned in fire, a passion so deep in the heartthat we are left burning and bruised until we slowly awaken toa new dawn and a new love. Because, it is after all in lovingthat we find joy……………..

I have done very little writing this summer. I guess I am OK with that, but I do find myself searching for something and I think the search is for something as comforting as writing was earlier in the year. It is so easy to blame summer. There is sheer joy in just being in the world where the windows are open to a constant breeze and the birds sings and the water becomes holy and warm and healing. I did spend a great deal of this summer healing and thinking about healing.

Before the summer ends I wanted to put some of these thoughts together in a cohesive essay because I think they might be helpful to other people who suffer from the chronic critical voice that lingers like a ticker-tape in the back of the mind, forever calling out some atrocity about to happen or warning us about some grievous fault that we have committed.

We have a mind that we can to some extent control. That is the mind we think with. “I think I want to go to the marketplace and purchase some vegetables for tonight’s dinner.” That statement is a thought that will most likely propel me into an action at some point so that I am able to accomplish the object of my desire: buy vegetables. The sound from that voice in my head was as clear as if I had spoken it out-loud.

But, what about the voice that speaks in a dimmer tone, the one that says: “you can’t do that, you are not smart enough, you have no culture and if you go out everyone you want to impress will know what a supreme jerk you are….” That voice is also a communication from the mind but it seems to have a more autonomic sense about it. It is not a thought that i decided that I wanted to have, rather it is a thought that stays suspended in a sub-conscious state and though we have no desire to listen to it, it may well propel us to action or passivity like the first example about the vegetables.

We are frequently guided by a force that seems to come from nowhere. We put our heads on the pillow and instead of a list of gratitudes, what comes out is a list of outlandish criticisms that seek to prevent us from going after what we want.

This summer I wanted to stay home at the Lake. The voice was very loud on many occasions telling me I was lazy, but I was able to overcome the voice by continuously reminding myself that following my desire is a more noble effort than sulking. It occurred to me many time this summer that if I was going to have a pleasant, free and easy summer that I was going to have to invite in the peace that comes from deliberate intention.

It remains amazing to me that the negative thoughts springing from some repetition in the ego are so easy to access, while the peaceful, calm, deliberate serenity that I get from writing, or reading or a multitude of other activities that I enjoy; these must be invited in. I like to use a “zen” like singing bowl, tap its side and listen to the vibrations that last into a long fading silence. This reminds me that I need to listen deliberately and that I must be conscious about inviting in gratitude….